Turkey’s pivotal role in the international drug trade

In August 1998 General Ismail Hakki Karadayi comes to the end of his term as chief of staff of Turkey’s armed forces. His five years in this post have been marked by the increasing role played by military officers in all aspects of Turkey’s political life, from the Kurdish question to relations with Greece and the ongoing struggle against the Islamists. There has also been a state-sponsored growth of mafia activities related to the drugs trade and many murders of opposition politicians and civil rights campaigners.

by Kendal Nezan

The attempted murder on 12 May this year of Akin Birdal, president
of the Turkish Human Rights Association, has reopened the debate on
the activities of the criminal networks which have flourished under
the protection of the Turkish authorities. The attempt took place in
Ankara a few weeks after a speech he made before a hearing of the
International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), of which he is
vice-president, drawing wide public attention to what is going on in
Turkey. Mr Birdal had protested that “In Spain, the 28 murders
committed by the GAL have become a matter of concern at the highest
government level, whereas in Turkey, which likes to present itself as
a law-abiding state and which is seeking admission to the European
Union, not one single perpetrator of more than 4,500 unsolved murders
carried out since 1991 - the so-called ’faili mesul cinayetleri’- has
thus far been arrested. In my country, the murderers are on the
streets and the intellectuals are behind bars.”

In a report published on 28 January 1997, the Turkish government’s
chief inspector described how, in the juridical no-man’s land of
Kurdish south-eastern Turkey, the army’s “special war” units were not
just killing with impunity, but had also become involved in
protection rackets, blackmail, rape and drug trafficking (1). The
report also describes how the Turkish government handed over the
security of a huge area - around the towns of Siverek and Hilvan - to
the private army of tribal chief Sedat Bucak, a member of parliament
close to the former prime minister, Tansu Çiller, who thus
acquired the power of life and death over the area’s inhabitants.

This warlord politician was, incidentally, the sole survivor of a
road accident in November 1996 near Susurluk on the road from Izmir
to Istanbul (2). He had been travelling together with a chief of
police and a well-known far-right Turkish mafia boss, Abdullah
Çatli, who had been implicated in the attempted assassination
of the Pope, was sought by Interpol for drug trafficking, and was
wanted by the Turkish state for the murder of seven left-wing
militants.

For the people of Turkey, Susurluk has become synonymous with the
Turkish state’s slide into mafia activities. It has prompted repeated
calls for a “clean-up” in the upper echelons of the state. The public
outcry has not been satisfied by the setting up of a parliamentary
commission, nor by Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz’s long TV appearance
on 23 January 1997, in which he commented on the report which had
just been submitted to him. These are seen just as attempts to cover
up the extent of the gangrene eating at the very heart of the state -
particularly because the political and police figures under suspicion
are still very much at large, and are claiming that they acted on
orders from high-up in the state apparatus (3).

The government’s chief inspector accuses a man by name of Yesil,
known as “the Terminator”, of having been responsible for at least
nineteen killings, including that of a member of parliament, Mehmet
Sincar. He also accuses him of having kidnapped - from the entrance
to the State Security Court in Diyarbakir - two young women,
Sükran Mizgin and Zeynep Baka, whom he raped and savagely
tortured before killing them.

The report states that the Terminator “acting in the full
knowledge of the MIT [National Intelligence Organisation],
one of whose chiefs he called baba’ [father], was able
to run a bank account in Ankara, through which passed huge sums of
money deriving from protection rackets and drug trafficking”.
Carrying papers supplied by the prime minister’s intelligence office,
this criminal left Turkey on 23 October 1996 and headed for Beirut,
in the company of two MIT agents travelling on diplomatic passports -
and, in the process, was received in the VIP lounge at Istanbul
airport normally reserved for the prime minister. In such a
situation, it is not possible just to talk of “events beyond our
control” or “policy errors”.

Another police serial-killer, Ayhan Çarkin, was
interrogated by the MIT on 28 August 1998. He said: “I have been
charged with being involved in 91 murders in eastern and
south-eastern Turkey. My interrogators have told me ’We know about
that, and nobody is holding that against you. But why did you kidnap
Omer Luftu Topal [the casino king]? On your own account? Do
you know that you are serving a political master? Namely Prime
Minister Tansu Çiller and Mehmet Agar, director-general of the
national police.’”

Mrs Çiller’s blustering statement on 4 October 1993 has
often been cited: “We know the list of businessmen and artists
subjected to racketeering by the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’
Party] and we shall be bringing their members to account.”
Beginning on 14 January 1994, almost a hundred people were
individually picked up by commandos wearing uniforms and travelling
in police vehicles. They were then killed somewhere along the road
from Ankara to Istanbul, in the “satanic triangle” of Kocaeli, a
fiefdom of the far-right mafia and a focal point for the trafficking
of heroin into Europe.

The operative head of the special operations bureau, who has been
directly implicated in these killings, was Abdullah Çatli, who
was close to the former prime minister - she paid him fulsome tribute
after his death in the Susurluk accident. He is reckoned to have been
one of the main perpetrators of underground operations carried out by
the Turkish branch of the Gladio (4) organisation and had played a
key role in the bloody events of the period 1976-80 which paved the
way for the military coup d’état of September 1980. As the
young head of the far-right Grey Wolves militia, he had been accused,
among other things, of the murder of seven left-wing students.

A “great patriot”

Abdullah Çatli is accused of having organised the escape
from prison and flight to Europe of Mehmet Ali Agça, the man
held responsible for the murder of the editor of the liberal daily
paper Milliyet. He was also reportedly the person who, at the
request of Turkish mafia chief Bekir Celenk, organised the
assassination attempt on the Pope, in exchange for the sum of 3
million marks for his gang. He was also seen in the company of
Stefano Della Chiaie, of the Italian branch of Gladio, while touring
Latin America and on a visit to Miami in September 1982. He took
refuge in France and there, under the assumed name of Hasan Kurtoglu,
he resumed his services for the Turkish state, which put him in
charge of a series of attacks on Armenian interests and on Asala, the
Armenian liberation movement. These included the blowing up of the
Armenian monument at Alfortville on 3 May 1984 and the attempted
murder of activist Ara Toronian.

The MIT paid him in heroin, and it was for drug trafficking that
he was eventually arrested in Paris on 24 October 1984. He was
sentenced to seven years imprisonment and in 1988 he was handed over
to Switzerland, where he was also wanted on charges of drug dealing.
Despite a fresh seven-year sentence, he contrived to escape in March
1990 with the assistance of mysterious accomplices. He returned to
Turkey, and was then recruited by the police for “special missions”.
This at a time when he was officially being sought by the Turkish
authorities for murder and faced a possible death penalty (5).

Çatli, hailed by Mrs Çiller as a “great patriot”,
was a terrible man with a dreadful record of atrocities to his name.
For example, he went and demanded money from people who were on
“Çiller’s list”, promising to get their names removed. Having
pocketed the money, he then went on to have them kidnapped and
killed, and sometimes tortured beforehand. One of his victims,
Behçet Canturk, was to pay ten million dollars, to which
Casino King Omer Luftu Topal added a further seventeen million. This
double ransom did not stop Canturk from being kidnapped on 28 July
1996 by police officers under the orders of Çatli. The
officers were recognised by a witness and reported to the Istanbul
police on 25 August 1996. They were arrested and briefly held in
Istanbul on 27 August, then promptly transferred by night to Ankara
on the personal orders of the minister of interior. In order to cover
for them, the minister placed them under the close protection of
deputy Bucak - a key figure in Tansu Çiller’s “special
organisation”. The witness who rashly reported the proceedings was
eliminated on 28 August...

The costs of the “special war” have been high. In 1993 a sum of
$70m was allocated from the prime minister’s secret funds. According
to Mr Savas, this sum was used mainly for buying weapons and
anti-terrorist equipment from Israel and for external operations. On
the home front, racketeering and secret funding made it possible to
maintain an array of hired killers and informers. However, the
expense of maintaining private armies such as that of Mr Bucak
(20,000 men) and the 64,000 “village guards” (pro-government Kurdish
militias) made it necessary to acquire more funding from somewhere.
Thus Turkey’s state-owned banks have been mobilised to provide
generous credit facilities for government supporters in the regions.
However, the main source of funding has been the trafficking of
heroin on a massive scale.

Since the 1950s, Turkey has played a key role in channelling into
Europe and the United States the heroin produced in the “Golden
Triangle” comprised by Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. The operation
is run by mafia groups closely controlled by the MIT. One of their
personnel described their relations with the police in the following
terms: “Our people are able to pass through Yesilköy (Istanbul)
airport whenever they wish, without being controlled by customs, with
briefcases containing 3-5 million marks. Sometimes they stamp their
passports, sometimes they don’t. Our boss has all kinds of false
passports, stamps etc. (6).”

Inci Baba, a known Turkish “godfather”, claimed on television and
in the columns of the Turkish Daily News on 7 December 1993,
to have been a close friend of President Süleyman Demirel and to
have “protected and helped” him during his years in the wilderness.
He even accompanied him on an official visit to Washington.

After the Gulf War in 1991, Turkey found itself deprived of the
all-important Iraqi market and, since it lacked significant oil
reserves of its own, it decided to make up for the loss by turning
more massively to drugs. The trafficking increased in intensity with
the arrival of the “hawks” in power, after the death in suspicious
circumstances of President Turgut Özal in April 1993. According
to the minister of interior, the war in Kurdistan had cost the
Turkish exchequer upwards of $12.5 billion (7). Whereas, according to
the daily Hürriyet, Turkey’s heroin trafficking brought
in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5 billion in 1996 (8).

Only criminal networks working in close cooperation with the
police and the army could possibly organise trafficking on such a
scale. Drug barons such as Huseyin Baybasin have stated publicly, on
Turkish television and in the West, that they have been working under
the protection of the Turkish government and to its financial benefit
(9). The traffickers themselves travel on diplomatic passports.
According to witnesses at the Parliamentary Commission inquiring into
the Susurluk accident, the drugs are even transported by military
helicopter from the Iranian border. The president of the commission
himself, deputy Mehmet Erkatmis, has protested against the fact that
these damning allegations have been censured out of the commission’s
official report...

In an explosive document made public by the editor of the weekly
Aydinlik at a press conference in Istanbul on 21 September
1996, the MIT itself accuses its rival organisation, Turkey’s
national police, of having “provided police identity cards and
diplomatic passports to members of a group which, in the guise of
anti-terrorist activities, travelled to Germany, the Netherlands,
Belgium, Hungary and Azerbaijan to engage in drug trafficking”. It
provided a list of names of some of the traffickers operating under
the protection of the police (10). The police, for their part, via
police chief Hanefi Avci, returned the compliment and handed over a
list of named drug traffickers employed by the MIT. According to the
official report drawn up by Kutlu Savas, the intra-police war for
control of this lucrative trade has thus far cost the lives of
fifteen MIT officers.

Western Europe is the principal target of this massive trafficking
operation. However, most European governments prefer to maintain an
embarrassed silence on Ankara’s dealings, in the same way that they
have refrained from open criticism of the destruction of 3,428
Kurdish villages and the displacement of more than three million
Kurds by their Turkish allies (11). However, on 22 January 1997 a
German judge, Ralf Schwalbe, launched public accusations against the
Turkish government in general and Tansu Çiller in particular.
These were taken up on by Tom Sackville, minister of state at the
British Home Office, who stated in the Sunday Times on 26
January 1997 that 80% of the heroin seized in Britain came from
Turkey, and that his government was concerned at reports that members
of the Turkish police, and even of the Turkish government, were
involved in drug trafficking.

Prompted by these disclosures, on 17 June 1997 the head of the
OECD’s “Financial Task Force”, Fernando Carpentieri, issued a solemn
warning that Turkey was “the only member of the OECD not applying the
measures decided by the OECD to prevent money laundering The
situation cannot be allowed to continue for much longer. We are
giving the Turkish authorities until September to pass the necessary
legislation. Otherwise the country could face a potentially
destructive reaction from the world banking community.”

Even Washington, Turkey’s faithful ally, has begun to break its
silence. The highly official International Narcotics Control Strategy
Report (INCSR) of the US State Department, published in February
1998, revealed that “about 75% of the heroin seized in Europe is
either produced in, or derives from, Turkey”, that “4 to 6 tons of
heroin arrive from there every month, heading for Western Europe” and
that “a number of laboratories for the purification of the opium used
in transforming the basic morphine into heroin are located on Turkish
soil”. The report stresses that Turkey is one of the countries most
affected by money-laundering, which takes place particularly via the
countries of the ex-Soviet Union, through the medium of casinos, the
construction industry and tourism.

(1) “In the region under State of Emergency
[the Kurdish provinces], the authority to apply the death
sentence has been brought down to the level of low-ranking officers
and, even more seriously, to repentant prisoners, who were the
terrorists of yesterday and are the potential criminals of tomorrow
... When persons have been handed over from one state service to
another, after a case has been has been adjourned in the courts, and
are found dead under a bridge, it is obvious that one cannot speak of
murders by unknown perpetrators.” So writes Government Inspector
Savas in his report, the expurgated text of which was published as a
supplement by the Turkish daily Radikal on 4 February
1998.

(2) See “Les liaisons dangereuses de la police
turque”, Le Monde diplomatique, March 1997, available in
English as “The dubious connections of the Turkish
police”.

(3) According to the Turkish daily
Hürriyet, 6 June 1998, 43 police officers accused of
involvement in these operations have been promoted.

(4) Gladio is an anti-communist resistance network
set up by NATO in Western Europe after the second world war. It has
been operating for 40 years.